When searching for a prompt on teaching
composition, I thought of the few friends I have tutored over the years. One of
the main things my friends seemed to struggle with the most was getting their
inspiration, getting their start. They would always turn to me and ask,
"What should I write about"? After I considered their question, I
would suggest using the internet, annotating articles, considering the subjects
that they felt passionate about, or just debating with one another on the
subject of the paper until a prompt came into being. While I thought myself to
be an adequate impromptu tutor, I had yet to pick up the book A Writer’s Reference, or read any
articles on composition theory. Still, I was not off to a bad start, as many of
the pre-writing tools I mentioned are in Diane Hacker and Nancy Sommers A Writer’s Reference, but there were
plenty more that I had not explored. In order to write an efficient and
articulate academic paper, it is necessary to try one or many of the
pre-writing tools found in Hacker’s, and to remember that writing tools are not
rules, they are loose steps intended as stones for you to create your own
pathway.
Every writer has their own method, and usually
that method works for them. There is no problem in using your own writing method,
so long as your method is evolved from established methods. Some writing
methods involve writing a first draft the night before the paper is due and
riding off the C or even B that is awarded. Notice how pre-writing did not
occur in that example, and pre-writing could have made the difference between
an average quality paper and a great paper. Even before writing this very
paper, I was going to begin without using any pre-writing methods. I was going
to commit the ultimate form of hypocrisy by lecturing on the necessity of
writing steps without first taking any of them myself. However, I paused before
writing this paper, reminding myself to utilize a few of the pre-writing
methods outlined in pages 1-64 of A
Writer’s Reference.
To start, I re-read parts of Hacker’s and other
articles on composition. Next, I thought about what interested me most about
the texts I had read. What was in those texts that inspired me to write? After
narrowing down my focus, I drafted a thesis. Thus far, the steps I took to in writing
this paper are all steps one can find in Hackers, beginning on page 3, titled
“Planning”. The planning, or pre-writing stage of writing, is where ideas are
hatched, nurtured, and finally given freedom. Though I had my thesis, I was not
ready to move on to the writing stage, not at full-blast. What I needed next
was a place to put those ideas in neat rows where I could get at them, critique
them, and add to them. I decided to write out an informal outline.
What is an informal outline you say, and how does
it differ from a formal outline? First, an informal outline is a great way to
list your ideas quickly, aligning them so that they make sense to your chosen
thesis, whereas Hackers says that “a formal outline may be useful later in the
writing process, after you have written your rough draft […to] help you see
whether the parts of your essay work together” (12).
The writing tools I used as part of my planning
stage are not the only ones available. In fact, Hackers lists a number of
pre-writing ideas, such as free-writing, clustering, and asking questions. Many
writers scoff at the idea of using pre-writing tools, and most of the time they
have never tried them. Pre-writing tools do work, if only to calm the jumble of
the many thoughts racing through a person’s mind while writing. A case study in
Sondra Perl’s article “Understanding Composing”, talks about the distractible
quality that is always present while writing: “My mind leaps from the task at
hand to what I need at the vegetable stand for tonight’s soup to the
threatening rain outside to ideas voiced in my writing group this morning, but
in between ‘distractions’ I hear myself trying out words I might use” (363).
Thus, think of pre-writing as a way to muddle through the myriad of thoughts
that bombard your brain. From the grocery list to the weather, pre-writing is
the glue that brings the important thoughts of writing together in a meaningful
way.
It is easy to think of writing as a fluid
process, one that begins with pre-writing and ends with revisions, but that is
not always the case. Writing is a messy process, even when one follows the
loose guidelines set forth by teachers and composition books. Writing is what
Sondra Perl believes to be a recursive process. A recursive writing process is
one that is far from a continuous process, and as the writer puts words down on
paper (either during pre-writing or beyond), he or she is constantly going back
to look over their words, re-reading for context and understanding, mentally deciding
what needs to written next. Writing as a muddied process is a sentiment echoed
by composition theorist Donald M. Murray, in his article “Making Meaning Clear:
The Logic of Revision”: “The writer’s meaning rarely arrives by room-service,
all neatly laid out on the tray. Meaning is usually discovered and clarified as
the writer makes hundreds of small decisions, each on igniting a sequence of
consideration and reconsideration” (88). Recursive writing is not wrong, and
one does not need to bury the recursive writing habit to write an academic
paper. However, to write a great academic paper, it helps to train your brain
to use pre-writing tools during that recursive process.
Another way to increase your quality of writing
is to harness what Perl calls the ‘felt sense’. The description of felt sense
is powerful, because for some, it describes what writing is: "The move [or felt sense] draws on sense experience, and
it can be observed if one pays close attention to what happens when writers
pause and seem to listen or otherwise react to what is inside of them"
(365). Part of what Perl is saying is that all writers experience physical feelings as they are writing,
and as they are trying to describe a particular scene, place, or emotion, they
should draw on their own inner emotions to fully convey their meaning through
prose. In other words, when writers say they have a muse, that muse can be a
place or a person, but the way that the writer translates their feelings for
that particular muse onto paper is the writing process known as felt sense.
Felt sense can be a pre-writing tool because if a writer can learn how to
recognize their felt sense, they can take advantage of that to create clear and
concise text.
Pre-writing tools are not the necessary evils that they have at times
been painted to be, rather they are simply necessary. It is also important to
remember that writing is a process full of varied steps that can be utilized in
different ways, so long as they are utilized. Writing is a large contradiction to itself,
being at once a process that requires certain steps and at the same time, a
process that seeks to avoid those steps and create new ones. Academic writing,
while different in many ways from fictional writing, is not the large boot that
stomps on creative writing as so many fear it is. Rather, one may keep their
own tone throughout the body of an academic paper, as long as the paper retains
structure, attention to detail, and clarity, all the perks that pre-writing has
to offer.
Works Cited
Hacker, Dianne & Sommers,
Nancy. A Writer’s Reference. Boston:
Bedford/St.Martins, 2011. Print.
Murray, M., Donald. Learning
by Teaching. Montclair:
Boyton, 1982. Print.
Perl, Sondra. “Understanding
Composing”. College Composition and
Communication 31.4 (Dec., 1980): 363-69. JSTOR Online Database. Web. 14 Nov. 2012.
